Saturday, July 23, 2016

I got an email from a customer and believe my reply might be of interest to many people. The customer quoted an article from another blog(?) that recommended to search directly out of the URL field. Here is my reply verbatim as I sent it:

The crux with all these "easy" tips
is that they all play right into the industry's game.

The more searches any given search
engine gets to perform the more money they can ask for
their aggregated info
on what we search for. The search engine
companies may not directly advertise to us but the companies
that buy this aggregated
search information can then advertise better and more
directly to us.

It's a fact that Bing and
Yahoo (they use
Bing) do NOT show us what in the search
results are paid
advertisements.

It's
a fact that way too
many advertisements get
abused to get malicious programs on our computers.

It's a
fact that some web
browsers (like IE and Edge, both from Microsoft!) make it very difficult or don't
allow us at
all to suppress
advertisements.

It's a fact that Google does not
allow us to suppress certain advertisements in
Google's own Chrome browser.

All the before said and more is behind my STRONG recommendation
to use only Firefox as I set it up for my customers.

And I urge my customers to search ONLY out of the
little browser specific Search window:

because when you search from there you get a Google search result

MINUS any advertisement(s),PLUS the red, yellow and green Web of Trust ratings right by
every search result.AND your search with Google has happened anonymously!

Update Jan. 10th 2017:Sadly around November 5th 2016 Mozilla, the organization that supplies Firefox and Google have removed that piece of code from their download pages; some details are here. If you remove the WOT extension or add-on from your Firefox browser it currently can not be re-installed!Google recently made the WOT extension available again.

If that is not reason enough for any of my customers
it's their decision and their money if I have to clean up their
machine again.

Scores (or thousands, or millions) of enterprise and home Symantec users
are open to remote compromise through multiple now-patched (where
possible) wormable remote code execution holes described by Google as
'as bad as it gets'.

Victims would not even need to open the malicious files to be compromised.

Some of those [affected] platforms cannot be upgraded.

Towards the end of the article The Register seems to quote six actions users should take to secure their systems. Four of those six are impossible to even think of for normal home users; they require corporate installations and corporate management structures that just are non-existent in home installations.

The other two require a level of know-how and technical expertise that is equally non-existent in the average home user environment.

The only consequent reaction for home user is what I preach to my customers for years:

Ditch any and all Norton products.

If you have allowed that Norton automatically charges your credit card you have to revoke that permission. You can get their phone number(s) through this web page.
Normally uninstalling them from Programs and Features in the Control Panel is not enough. I recommend to additionally run the Norton Removal Tool downloaded from this page; click on either of the links "Download@MajorGeeks".

About Me

52 years in Information Technology and 34 years of experience with PCs as of 2016. Specialized in non-destructive virus and malware removal, home computer protection and showing my customers how to keep their computers "mean and clean". From 2004 to 2015 I was the regular computer guru on a local radio call-in talk show. From April 2015 through April 2016 I was bi-wwekly on WBKV 1470AM. I offer only house calls and work exclusively on MS-Windows. I do NOT sell hardware or software, I sell only my know how, my experience and my time.